Invictus
by Cygna-hime
Summary: The story in brief of Gippal's life, from birth to life after the fall of Vegnagun. How he became what he was, and what he did with it afterward.


_Disclaimer: I don't own any Final Fantasy X/X-2 characters, and am not using them to make a profit. All characters not appearing in either game, however, are mine._

_Notes: My first piece of any length and non-suckitude with these characters, and it's 7500 words long. Go figure. Contains a whole lot of Gippal. Overdose may result. No pairing implications in particular. Indulges in a truly ridiculous degree of backstory. If boredom results, please contact a shorter story. If you are in some way insulted, please keep it to yourself, because I swear I'm not trying._

_Thoughtful responses are always appreciated, especially regarding character voices and worldbuilding. Thank you for your time!_

0.

Gippal was born a short distance from the town of Djose. His parents had chosen to live there rather than allowing themselves to be banished to one of the struggling Al Bhed island communities, in the hope that even followers of Yevon would cease to hate people who lived peacefully among them. Being no fools for that, they arranged for a relative to come by every week or two, in case something happened. Nothing did, but only barely.

No power on Spira could have kept glass in their windows for the first year or more, though. Gippal was born in that glassless house, gurgling happily as his mother carried him from room to room.

"He's the best baby there ever was," she cooed.

Gippal's father chuckled. "Of course he is. He's ours, isn't he?"

1.

Gippal was barely a year old when his mother started taking him into town on her trips to cajole the shopkeepers into allowing her to buy the things they needed. She soon found that some of the wariness vanished from their eyes when they saw the child on her hip, as though Gippal's presence made her less of a danger.

On day she set him down for a moment to gather up her purchases, and in the interval he crawled away faster than someone so small should have been able to move. By the time she turned around, he was lost in the crowd.

She found him at last almost at the highroad, in the arms of a Yevonite woman who smiled at his babble. She did not smile at his mother.

"He's yours?" she said curtly, as though there were another Al Bhed family he might belong to.

"Yes. I am so sorry about my son. I did not know he could crawl so quickly." Her Spiran was good, but it would never be natural, and she knew it. The woman did too; she sniffed as she handed Gippal back.

"Gippal, you mustn't get out of my sight like that," she said to him in Al Bhed. "No. Do you understand?"

"Wacyguwit," Gippal babbled in the mixture of Al Bhed and Spiran that he had yet to separate into coherent sounds.

His mother kept bringing him into town, for his own sake as much as for hers, but he was always looking for a way to escape, and she soon learned never to take her hand off him.

2.

Gippal's first word was in Al Bhed: "Mama". After that, his vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds, both in the Al Bhed he heard at home and the Spiran he heard in town. His favorite word, in either language, was "Why?" closely followed by "What?"

"What?" he demanded imperiously, pointing at his father's box of basic tools.

"This is a spirit level," his father answered. "This is a screwdriver, and these are pliers."

"Oh." Gippal stuck a thumb in his mouth and regarded the pliers with interest. "Want pires."

"No, Gippal. You're too young to use these tools. You'll hurt yourself."

"Why?"

"Because your hands are too small to control them properly."

"Want pires!"

"No."

"Want!"

Seeing that his usually even-tempered son was on the verge of a tantrum, he sighed and pulled out a short ruler. "Here. You can play with that. Quietly, mind; I'm working."

By the time he wrestled the ruler out of Gippal's tenacious grasp, it was covered with tooth marks, and Gippal had a new favorite toy.

3.

"Want that."

"No, Gippal. You may not have a sword."

"Want it!"

"No." Gippal's mother sighed and grabbed the back of her son's shirt before he made a break for the weapons display. "…And a dozen Eye Drops, if you have them."

The shopkeeper looked at her oddly. "What do you need those for?"

"A trunk that we bought recently, the previous owner put a charm of darkness on it, and we need to open it to take the charm off." Apparently that explanation was normal enough, because the shopkeeper produced the requested items without comment. The truth, that they wanted to analyze the contents so they could try making their own, would not have been so acceptable.

While his mother's attention was elsewhere, Gippal wandered off to investigate the armor stacked neatly against the wall. With an expression of deepest concentration, he proceeded to bang a spell-engraved armlet against a matching shield. The noise was barely noticeable in the bustle of the shop when the armlet was snatched roughly out of his small hands.

"These are tools, not toys for children," snapped the warrior monk. Gippal pouted and reached up for the armlet, blinking wide green eyes at the man. His face darkened. "And gear blessed by Yevon is not a fit tool for Al Bhed heathens, much less their brats."

"Mine!" Gippal replied, ignoring the words he didn't understand. "Give it back!"

The warrior monk's hand tightened on his sword hilt. "You dare--"

Alerted by her son's plaintive wails, Gippal's mother looked around and saw what was happening. She rushed over and scooped him into her arms, half-turning to protect the child. "It's all right," she murmured desperately to calm him. "It's all right, just be quiet for mama, can you do that?" With a last few sniffs, Gippal quieted, and his mother apologized profusely to the warrior monk for having disturbed him. The man stalked out with a dismissive snort, and she gathered her purchases and hurried home.

They avoided that shop when they could, after that. It was too near the temple for comfort.

4.

"How does that work?" Gippal demanded, poking the sphere recorder his father was piecing together.

"This piece captures the natural pyreflies in the environment, and the this valve regulates the amount that can pass into the sphere, so that the recording is even. It connects to--ah, there we go!--this switch here, which opens the valve when the recorder is turned on. Do you see?" He had long since given up on simplifying his explanations for Gippal's benefit; Gippal would only ask for more detail until he could no longer understand.

"Can I try?"

"Not on this one. I'm almost done. Go ask your mother for something to do."

It was the Al Bhed custom to teach children as soon as they wanted to learn, even though that was seldom so early, so Gippal's mother found an old compass with no fragile pieces for him to tinker with. He looked at it carefully, then took it slowly and laboriously to pieces, and his parents helped him put it back together.

5.

By the time Gippal was five years old, the situation had improved to the point where it was safe for him to wander around the village unsupervised, as long as he promised not to go too close to the temple. Instead, he took the wooden cat his father had carved for him and went in search of friends.

Most of the children his age had been warned not to play with the Al Bhed boy, but they listened to their parents in the same way he did: only when they were watching. Someone inevitably started up a game of tag or hide-and-find, and no one would stop him if he joined in.

One day he went looking for his playmates and found them gathered around a fenced-in area slightly nearer the temple than he was supposed to go, where some adults were fighting with swords.

"Who're they?" he asked, impressed.

"They're Crusaders!" said one little girl, bouncing on her toes to see better. "They fight really hard and wear really shiny armor and keep Sin away!"

"_Really_?"

"Uh-huh! My sister's a Crusader, and she said so!"

Gippal watched the Crusaders practice until his mother's increasingly desperate calls reached his ears. When he bounced home at her side, he said, "I wanna be a Crusader when I grow up. Can I, Mama?"

His mother only said, "We'll see," not wanting to disappoint him. He would find out what it meant to be an Al Bhed in this Yevonite's world soon enough; there was no reason to hurry on the lesson only to crush his dreams.

The next day, Gippal wanted to be a chocobo rider, and his parents thought he had forgotten all about the Crusaders. But he kept watching them, venturing close and then ducking only far enough away to be ignored again when they shouted. He watched and learned, and he dreamed.

6.

When Gippal was six, his parents let him start learning how machina worked in earnest. His first lesson was the tools, whirring and buzzing things that could slice and shape scrap metal into the parts they needed. He cut his hand on the busily spinning saw before he believed his mother's warnings that moving parts were not to be touched.

But he was disappointed by the lack of variety in the finished products: sphere recorders, navigation tools, and the handful of other machina approved by Yevon for use by the faithful.

"That's all we can make here," his father said.

"Why?"

"Because Yevon forbids other kinds of machina, and we could not sell any other kind to them."

"Why do they forbid it?"

"That's just the way they are, Gippal. Hand me that drill."

Gippal, typically, was unsatisfied with this explanation, but, distracted by the prospect of further tinkering, let it pass for the moment.

7.

Gippal wasn't supposed to hear his parents' conversation. He had been put to bed, and he should have remained there. Instead, kept wakeful by the sounds of talking and his own curiousity, he had crept to the door and listened as hard as he could to the sounds of his parents arguing in the other room.

"I don't like it," his father was saying. "We're not good enough to spit on one minute, then they think we can be _useful_ and we're their best friends."

"I like it no more than you," said his mother, "but I don't see much choice for us. If we refuse, you know what will happen as well as I. You know what happened to Erikkyn, when those in Bevelle found her out."

"They couldn't do that _here_, surely. This isn't Bevelle."

"Couldn't they? Do you really think one of those at the temple would lift a finger for us? Better we be gone, if we refuse."

"We're not leaving!" Gippal heard his father snap. "We've put too much time and sweat into this to give up now. Gippal has friends here, friends who're on the way to knowing Al Bhed as more than an idea. If we go, we throw away Gippal's future. Think of that."

"It's Gippal's future I'm worried about! I'd like him to have one, for example."

"If we do this, he won't have one, either, or not one worth having. To sell our people's blood for trinkets and promises…"

"There must be machina other than weapons we can make," said his mother. "They must use machina for _something_ other than killing."

"You're right, as always." At that point the rustling sound of movement frightened Gippal back to bed, where he eventually fell asleep.

After that, he got to help put together different kinds of machina, as long as he promised to keep them a secret between the three of them. He only understood why years later.

8.

They were working on a new design of machina, a kind of circular saw that could cut metal with greater efficiency, powered by trapped lightning. Gippal was watching and handing his parents tools. His mother asked him to get a roll of wire from the cupboard. He was turning back, the coil in his hand, when the lightning destabilized. The saw exploded.

Half an hour later, a passerby heard Gippal's screams. When she got up her nerve to enter a heathen dwelling, a fear as much of possible machina sentries as of religious stain, she found the child huddled in a corner, screaming, blood running down his face. His mother and father lay across the room, pierced a dozen times by shrapnel. They were most definitely dead.

Rather than try to do anything herself, the woman gathered Gippal up as carefully as she could and bore him to the temple. There the healers took him, willing to care even for an Al Bhed, when it came in the form of a frightened child, but the best they could do was not quite enough. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in Gippal's eye, and though they could remove it and halt the spread of infection, the eye was a fragile organ, one of the most difficult to repair at the best of times. The sight in that eye would never return.

Gippal stayed at the temple as he recovered, ignoring the talk that passed over his head in favor of clinging to the healer who comforted him through the nights of blood-steeped nightmares that followed. In a few days he was part of the world enough to ask, "What's going to happen to me?" No one knew the answer.

"Just get rid of him," said the straight-laced captain of the warrior monks. "There's no room in the house of Yevon for Al Bhed infidels."

"He's only a child," said Gippal's favorite healer. "Surely whatever blasphemous notions he has at his age can be trained out of him, given time."

"It wouldn't be right to have him here," said the chief priest, "but let it not be said that Yevon was remiss in offering absolution. Isn't there some good family in the town who would take him?"

Things were at this stage when Gippal's aunt arrived. The weekly visits had turned into monthly ones, so Gippal had been at the temple for three weeks and more before she came, found the house empty, and asked desperately around town until she found out what had become of her brother and his family. It took her some hours to argue her way into the temple to see her nephew, but when she did, she put an end to all the arguments.

"He will come home with me," she declared with the air of one defying Yevon to deny her, Al Bhed though she was. "He belongs with his family." And the priests let them go.

Gippal cried for his home and his parents, but Home, still newly built, was full of distractions, and he loved his aunt. Soon he was his old self, running around the new construction and getting into things he was supposed to stay out of.

"Children heal quickly," his aunt said to a friend as they watched him at play.

Her friend smiled wryly. "They have to, in this world."

9.

"Gippal, give it back!" Rikku yelled, dashing after her friend.

"No! It's mine!"

"Is not!"

"Finding's keeping, and I found it!"

"Just 'cause I put it down, you meanie!"

Gippal was taller than Rikku, barely, enough to keep the feather out of her reach as she jumped for it. Seeing this, she changed the direction of her jumps from the feather to him, and the pair tumbled onto the sand. "Ow! Rikku, that hurts! Quit biting me!"

"Gimme back my feather," she said around a mouthful of his arm.

"Fine, fine, take the stupid feather! Now leggo!"

"Say sorry!"

Fortunately for all concerned, Gippal's aunt found and separated them before they came to real blows. "If you keep that up, you two, you'll be too busy being confined to your rooms to help me on the hover engine."

"She started it!"

"I did not!"

"Did too! Look, she bit me!"

Looking at the proffered arm, Gippal's aunt found with relief that, although the pattern of dents had clearly been made by teeth, none of them had broken the skin. "You're fine. Now, do you want to work on the engine or not?"

"We do, we do!" the children chorused.

They were good for each other, the woman decided as they skipped ahead to the workroom. There were a lot of people still who regarded Gippal as an outsider, half-Yevonite even, but no friend of Rikku's could be a stranger long, not even if he were the kind to try. And as for Rikku, she could use a playmate who could keep up with her for once in her life.

10.

Everyone knew when Velia died. They had been worrying since she had begun to sicken, and waiting since it had become evident that she would not recover. Velia was as strong a character as her husband, and even more popular: everyone in the close-knit community of Home knew her as the mother or older sister they would have asked for, if they had asked, always there with advice, bandages, and extra glue.

But she really was Rikku's mother.

When the first mourning wails echoed through Home, the cry taken up by voice after voice for their common loss, Gippal ducked out of his aunt's grasp and ran down the clattering metal hallways until he reached the original source of the noise. He was barely there when the door slammed open and Rikku's oldest brother stomped out with a face like a thundercloud.

"Where's Rikku?" Gippal asked him.

"Inside," he replied shortly. Taking that as invitation, Gippal crept around the doorposts and into the house.

Despite the sounds of sorrow, it seemed too quiet. As long as there had been a Home on Bikanel Island, Velia had been in that house, her cheerful presence permeating the walls, and suddenly she was gone.

Gippal didn't have to venture far to find Rikku: she was huddled on the couch with her other brother. On any other day, Gippal might have paid more attention to Keyakku, who at fourteen seemed impossibly handsome and grown-up, but not then. Rikku was his best friend.

As soon as she saw him there she launched herself at him, sobbing. Gippal hugged her back, offering clumsily what comfort he could, and found that he was crying too, partly for Rikku's loss and partly for his own.

11.

"Hey, Nhadala!" Gippal greeted his cousin cheerily, barely looking up from the engine pieces in front of him to wave.

"Hey, Gippal. What're you up to?"

"I was looking at the hover plans--"

"How did you get to see those? The plans are supposed to be locked up when they're not being modified." Her cousin didn't meet her eyes. "_Gippal_…"

"Well, they shouldn't put such a weak lock on it!" he retorted. "Anyway, I was looking at them, and I think there's a way to make the hovers really fly, up in the clouds and everything."

"Are you sure?" Nhadala couldn't stop herself from asking. Gippal was only eleven, after all. She was almost sixteen, and she'd never heard of anything like that, and while she was willing to admit that Gippal had a natural gift with machina, she wasn't quite willing to add that he was already better than people two and three times his age.

Gippal grinned up at her from where he was sprawled. "Nope! But I'm gonna be in a minute. Want to help?"

"Okay." Someone had to make sure he didn't blow himself up, after all. It was an ever-present risk for the machina workers; as a result, they were only supposed to work in pairs or more, but Gippal, especially when he was modifying a design he shouldn't have known about in the first place, had a certain tendency to ignore that rule. It was a miracle he'd survived this long.

To Nhadala's surprise, Gippal really did know what he was doing. He must have spent some time with the plans, to know what each component did and how to connect it to the others. She still had to make him write down the changes he had made, so they could do it again if it worked or modify it if it didn't, over his vociferous objections that he could remember it fine without writing it down.

The hours passed like minutes, until at last they looked down in satisfaction at the modified engine wedged awkwardly in the hover where the original had rested so tidily.

"Let's see if it works," Gippal said, clambering onto the hover to switch on the engine.

He managed to jump off before it crashed against the ceiling. "I think it needs work," he observed as they ducked under a desk to avoid the falling hover parts. "We forgot to put in steering for going up and down."

Voices from outside shouted at them, demanding to know what that sound was and if they were all right. In a minute they would come in to find out for themselves and discover that Gippal had managed to rope someone else into one of his crazy schemes.

Nhadala shared a conspiratorial smile with her young cousin. They made a good team.

12.

Gippal was never shy. Even when he was nervous, he made up for it by being even louder and more friendly. So it was a foregone conclusion that he walked up to the first girl he developed a crush on and said, "I really like you."

She laughed.

"I told you that was dumb," Rikku said wisely later, leaning on a pile of machina parts in their favorite workshop.

"How would you know?" Gippal retorted, his pride stung. "You never liked anyone. You're just a kid, Cid's girl."

"Don't call me that! I have a name!"

"You get a name when you're grown up enough to deserve one," he said, making a face at her.

She laughed despite herself. "Then you'll never get one, meanie-pants. An' anyway, I'm younger than you, but I'm smarter--and taller--" Gippal grumbled; he considered it deeply unfair that an early growth spurt put Rikku's eyes four inches above his own. "--and I've heard people talking. Girls want, I dunno, presents and stuff, and maybe a boy who isn't so dumb and thinking he's better just 'cause he's older, so there." She stuck her tongue out at him. "And she was silly, anyway."

"Was not." There was no real heat in the remark.

"Was so. I mean, you're dumb, but you're not _that_ dumb, not like my brother. 'Cause you hang around with me, so the smartness rubs off on you!"

"Gee, thanks."

"You're welcome!"

The next girl Gippal was interested in worked on machina salvage. Gippal helped her fix the ship's crane, then asked her to come to dinner. She didn't laugh, and Rikku, after an exacting interview, said she was okay. Gippal really liked her, but after the repairs were done she went back out to work. When she came back, they both knew it wasn't the same. Besides, Gippal and Rikku were collaboratively mooning over one of the older boys who worked in the repair shop by that time, and had little time for anything else besides machina.

13.

On his thirteenth birthday, when he would by Yevonite standards have been old enough to work, though he had in fact been doing the work of an adult for some time, Gippal went into the trunk he kept by his bed and took out the schematics he kept there. They were the designs for a metal saw that would run automatically, powered by natural lightning. Then he shut himself in an empty workroom and started working.

For a week, he didn't come out except when his aunt banged on the door and made him eat. Nhadala and Rikku dropped by for the first few days, asking to be let in, but when Gippal continued to yell, "I'm busy! Go away!" they let him be. Gippal could be trusted to know what he was doing, most of the time.

After that week he finally reappeared, smeared with grease and covered with metal shavings. The skin around his eyepatch was red with rubbing, and he looked as though he hadn't slept for days, to the point where Nhadala threatened to knock him unconscious if he didn't get some sleep, but they didn't really worry. He was grinning so widely Rikku said his head was going to fall off in a minute, and in his arms he held the finished saw.

It worked perfectly.

14.

"I'm going back to Djose," Gippal announced, sitting at the dining table and wiping machine oil off his hands.

"You're _what_?" said his aunt. "Gippal…"

"Hey, I've still got the house, right?" he said, smiling lopsidedly. "Seems a shame to waste it."

"But why now? You're still so young…"

"I'm practically a grown-up," said Gippal, and he looked very young to his aunt, fourteen years old and thinking he knew everything there was to know about the world. "And it's nothing against you, really it isn't, but I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in the desert. I'm going home."

The words hurt, although she knew he didn't mean them to: she'd tried to make this a home for him, and he had lived in her house for almost as long as he had lived in Djose. Besides, this was supposed to be the Home of all Al Bhed, the place they could belong, not some house on the outskirts of a temple that hated the sight of them. She didn't understand how he could prefer that to this.

"But, Gippal, how will you live there? It's so dangerous--how will you work?"

He just grinned, confident in his own luck. "I'll find a way."

Her brother had said the same thing, before he left. "You're just like your parents," she said, bursting into tears as she had not since her niece's death three years before. "Just like them, always wanting the same foolish things…"

He wrapped her in an awkward hug, the kind that he had once given so freely and which had ceased in embarrassment as he grew older. "I'll be okay, I promise. I'll come back to visit."

Rikku railed at him for an hour before he got a word in edgewise. "What d'you think those crazy Yevonites are gonna do, just sit back and wave at their new neighbor? Maybe let you set up shop in their precious temple? Are you out of your _mind_?!"

"It worked before, didn't it?"

"Says you! I wouldn't call that 'worked', or what're you doing here?" When Rikku was really angry, she took no prisoners.

Gippal winced. "That had nothing to do with the Yevonites. C'mon, I though you'd be glad to see the back of me for a while."

"That's not the point! The point is, you're leaving me here with Father and my dumb brother and Keyakku who's never here, you jerk!"

"…Good point. But hey, this way you'll have no competition for breaking the hearts of the entire population." Gippal winked.

Rikku was not amused. She did, however, pause in her harangue, and a cunning look stole over her face. "None of the pretty Yevonites'll talk to you. You'll get _loooonely_."

"Your cousin Yu-whatshername would disagree."

"Ah-ha!" Rikku bounced on her toes. "This is all a plot to go bother pretty Yevonites who haven't met you before and won't know to run away, isn't it?"

"Yes, absolutely," he deadpanned. "I needed more targets for my charming ways."

"Just you wait 'till you're alone surrounded by weird Yevonites who can't even hold a screwdriver, and you'll wish you'd brought me along when you had the chance."

Gippal blinked. "Are you trying to get me killed? Cid would rip my guts out and use them for fan belts if I took you out of his sight!"

"True," Rikku sighed. "And we'd probably have to get married, too. Ugh." She looked at Gippal very closely, then grabbed his ears and yanked his head down so she could kiss him full on the mouth. "If I don't hear from you every week, I'm gonna steal a ship and come get you, y'hear?"

15.

Gippal ignored the stares and whispers he received as he strolled into the Crusader lodge. The men and women relaxing or bandaging recent injuries inside looked up, and more than one hand felt for a weapon. Gippal grinned and waved at the nearest gawker, open and friendly and clearly unarmed, and sauntered over to the woman writing up reports behind the desk.

"What do you want?" she asked, curtly but more politely than he had expected. Around them, the lodge was full of the silence caused by numerous people listening with all their might.

"I want to join the Crusaders," Gippal said. Someone laughed. It was not a friendly sound.

"You can't. Go away."

"Why can't I? I'm fifteen, can use a sword--maybe not as well as you, but I'm not bad--never been arrested for anything, and want nothing more than to fight to protect Spira. What's wrong with that?"

The woman actually looked him in the eye, if only to fix him with a glare designed to melt his bones where he stood. Fortunately, he had spent years being glared at by experts, and she wasn't half as threatening as Zamon when Gippal forgot to return a borrowed tool. Of course, she was twice as willing and able to follow through on the threat, so it balanced out. "Al Bhed are not eligible to join the forces of Yevon, machina-lover."

"Where does it say?" he persisted.

She sighed and pointed at the charter of the Crusaders where it hung prominently on the wall behind her. "Right there. 'No one who is not a follower in good standing and without lapse of the teachings of Yevon may become a Crusader.' So get out."

Knowing a lost battle when he saw one, and at least occasionally willing to accept that it was lost, Gippal left before he was thrown out bodily. He proceeded to make a pest of himself hanging about the lodge and practice fields, however, as token that he was not taking the refusal as final. It didn't take long for a particularly brawny man to be sent to see him off.

"Why are you doing this?" the Crusader demanded. "What's Djose to someone like you?"

"I was born here," Gippal replied frankly. The man looked at him with something like interest. Gippal returned the favor, and added a little extra on his own account. "My name's Gippal," he said with his most charming smile. "What's yours?"

"None of your business, Sin-kin," the man growled, sending him stumbling the last few steps out of the area unofficially set aside for the Crusaders. "Now stay away from us, if you value your skin."

Rikku had been right. It did get lonely.

16.

He heard about it in the town, where he spent as much time as he could bring himself to spare from working on machina (strictly Yevon-approved, but to make things interesting he set his ingenuity to work making improvements on the old designs). The were talking about it in the weapons shop when he went in to purchase a new sword for the metal he needed.

"They're calling it the Crimson Squad," said the local blacksmith with awe in his voice. "The Wen, Maester Kinoc himself, is behind it."

"I heard they'll take anyone," a woman he recognized as living near him said. "Even if you've never been a warrior, as long as you can hold your own in a fight."

"Giving just anyone command of entire chapters of Crusaders is a fool's whim," said a career Crusader, a grizzled man with a scarred face testament to his resilience in the face of the worst Spira had to offer. "They're screwing with the command structure to favor those who couldn't get promoted on their own merit."

Gippal listened to them all closely, then paid for his sword and went back home, where he started to pack, whistling softly to himself and looking down the Djose Highroad toward Mushroom Rock.

They might not have let him join, but he'd be a Crusader anyway, one way or another.

17.

When the smoke cleared, Gippal found with some surprise that he was still alive. Even with his aunt dead in the ruins of the Home to which he could never again visit, even with his friends and those he had thought friends dead or gone, even with the dark dreams of malice and machina that visited him, the fact brought him some pleasure. He was alive, and his home if not his Home was still his, and there was something left of the world for him to protect.

He was one of the few Al Bhed who had a place left to go, and so in the following weeks more and more old friends, family, and acquaintances found their way to Djose, looking for a way to fit into the world again. Gippal put on his normal, carefree manner like a coat, smiled, and told them to make themselves useful. There were a great number of machina salvaged in pieces from the wreckage that needed to be repaired or remade. As they worked, they healed, and Gippal stopped feeling quite so much as though he were sharing a house with dead men and women.

To his surprise, many of those who had come to him were reluctant to leave, and more came to join them as the refugees scrambled to find shelter for themselves. Soon there were more Al Bhed in Djose than those who remained faithful to Yevon, and as the temples emptied, the faithful fleeing to Bevelle and the disillusioned to Mushroom Rock, more of Gippal's people came. At last Gippal decided that they might as well move into the temple, since no one else seemed to be using it.

"Machina in a holy temple would be sacrilege!" the townsfolk, who were mostly clinging to what they had always believed for lack of anything else.

"They're not machina," Gippal lied glibly, making it up as he went. "Machina are old. These are new _machines_ for a new age." He reflected that he seemed to have picked up more than he had realized from Baralai, then tried not to think about the dark smoothness of his friend's face as he lied the four of them out of trouble. If he thought about it, it would be unbearable to turn around and not see him there.

Instead, he worked, like his people, waiting until the pain was distanced enough to bear looking more closely.

Old friends, fellow tinkerers, and friends of both, gathered around him in Djose, apparently unwilling to leave and happy to take orders from someone good at pretending to know what he was doing. Gippal did not even think of Nooj, and whether he had ever felt like this while becoming a leader of legend. His well-trained mind skittered around the thought before it really appeared, leaving only the trace of bitterness behind. For the most part, he could pretend to know what to do, and Nhadala, blissfully alive and well, helped when he was well and truly lost.

He spent a lot of time convincing people to stay calm when past events caught up with them and they threatened to break down, or when a small machine failure turned into a large one. "Don't panic, just tell me how this happened," he said and thought of Paine, alive but maybe as good as dead to him, and he had to take his own advice.

"The Youth League wants to buy some guard machines," someone reported, and Gippal managed to suppress the urge to refuse immediately, because once he would have agreed without thought. There were more people than one (he did not think, "than Nooj") in the Youth League, and they deserved better than that. So he agreed.

As the faction of which he had somehow become leader swelled, non-Al Bhed began to arrive, asking for work. There were few places hiring in any volume, and people needed the jobs, so Gippal sighed and began regularly trying to duck out of doing interviews.

He worked, and he argued, and he put the world back together.

18.

He'd thought it was over, when he'd had no choice but to think of it. He'd thought the betrayal of the Crimson Squad buried with their bones, save for the handful who lived with it still bound to theirs. At times he had wanted to go back alone, when he could be no danger to anyone else, and find out for sure if they had been hallucinating or not, but the Youth League sat atop the winding roads that led to the cave, and though he owed those who also tried to make a new world his machines, his presence was his own to withhold.

He'd thought, when he hadn't been able to avoid it, that it was over, the people he'd thought friends not so and nothing to be done about it but live with the wound. And then it showed up on his doorstep, very much alive.

He didn't know what to say to or about Paine. She'd been as close as a sister once, but she had not been there when he and Baralai had awoken in the Mi'ihen Travel Agency, and while he would once have said confidently that she would never countenance such betrayal, he would have had the same confidence in Nooj. He settled for falling in with her pretense and saying nothing at all, and focused on Rikku (had she always been so much younger, or did she, too, look younger than she felt?) and her cousin.

Then Baralai called, and Gippal answered, hoping against hope that he could salvage something of what they had been from the wreckage as he salvaged machines from the wreckage of Home.

They hadn't been hallucinating. He had always known that, but he stopped doubting his own certainty when he felt the same presence claw at his soul, despair cloaked in a swirl of pyreflies.

He didn't want to die. He loved the world, and not all the whispers of vengeance for the centuries of torment his people had suffered could make him do otherwise. There was too much worth loving: Rikku, Nhadala, the people who trusted him against their own better judgment to know what to do, the people who smiled back when he smiled at them in the street now instead of pretending not to see them, all Spira to see and learn about, and Baralai, Paine, and Nooj, none of them as gone as he thought.

He felt the despair slip from his soul, and though he often wished in the days that followed that Shuyin had taken him and left Baralai to follow, in that instant he regretted nothing.

He didn't want to die, but if he was to go the way of the rest of the Crimson Squad that had never been, it was worth it to have Nooj strong by his side and not be afraid to turn his back.

19.

The world had inexplicably failed to come to an end, so there was work to be done, including paperwork, which was fast edging out old-fashioned members of New Yevon as the bane of Gippal's existence. Also the small matters of explaining to his people where he'd been when they'd needed him, arranging for fiend damage to be fixed, and beginning the, in his opinion, unnecessarily complicated process of uniting Spira's government.

In the first moment of relatively spare time he had, he tracked down Shinra and got him to make a connected set of CommSpheres, which he shared out between the three of them. He also gave one to Paine, allegedly to hold on Yuna's behalf in case they needed to consult her, but really for old times' sake. Since the others treated her participation in their debates like something natural, he guessed they felt the same way. Besides, sometimes Paine's levelheaded, objective intervention was all that kept them from degenerating into real shouting matches.

As matters progressed on that front, Gippal found himself delegating more and more Machine Faction business to Nhadala, which suited them both: she was ten times the organizer he'd ever be, and that way he could spend almost enough time hashing out the details of governing Spira in person rather than through nervous intermediaries. Besides, his people were so firmly entrenched in Djose that one of his primary duties, dealing with suspicious Yevonites, was no longer needed.

Rikku dropped by every now and then, sometimes with Paine and Yuna (and Yuna's boyfriend, who had given him a bad shock the first time they appeared without warning and Gippal found himself pointing a gun at the man who looked so like Shuyin without even thinking about it), sometimes on her own. When they showed up as a group he and Rikku took it in turns to call Paine "Doctor P." until she threatened to knock their heads together, at which point he switched to calling Rikku "Cid's girl" until she kicked him. When Rikku showed up alone, Gippal unrepentantly dragged her off to work on his latest pet project until they were both half-asleep and filthy.

"Say, this is _neat_," Rikku said, fiddling with what was going, in theory, to be a mechanical excavator capable of doubling the speed of excavation on Bikanel. "So the drill fits into the frame and comes down where the metal sensor tells it to…you could find stuff way deep down with this."

"Yup, and the further you go, the more there is," Gippal agreed. "Just imagine: all the raw materials we'll need, actually having spare parts without dismantling something else for them…"

"…Enough leftover scrap for you to make that superfast personal hover you showed me the design for…" Rikku added wickedly.

"Hey, I think I deserve a reward for all my hard work!"

"You, work? Do I look like I have mush for brains? I have talked to Nhadala, you know."

"What she says is lies. All lies. I absolute did not use, quote, 'masculine wiles', end quote, to persuade Ropp that the people responsible for reading the requisition forms would rather read his handwriting than mine, and no matter what she said, the explosion that wiped out the progress reports was perfectly coincidental."

"Really now?" Rikku drawled, hands on hips. "And the urgent need to visit Bevelle that just happened to be at the same time as the latest batch of interviewees?"

"Actually, that was genuine," said Baralai's voice from the CommSphere resting on what was theoretically Gippal's desk and practically his toolbox. "But as for the rest…masculine wiles, Gippal? I didn't know you had it in you."

"Didn't you? I'll have to fix that, won't I?" replied Gippal, looking up from the parts he was working on. "Any chance a demonstration of my very masculine wiles would get me out of this meeting so I could get back to my machines?"

"I wouldn't waste the effort, if I were you," said Nooj drily. "Much as I hate to disturb your tinkering, we have work to do."

"See?" Gippal said to Rikku, walking over to the CommSphere. "Work. I told you I did work."

"When I make you."

"That's why you're the captain," said Gippal cheerfully. "So what needs to be decided today?"

"Transportation again, I'm afraid," Baralai responded. "It's been a dry year in the south, and we need a way of keeping food fresh while we ship it, or else a faster means of transport, if we don't want to be facing famine."

"I'll get more transport hovers built as soon as we can dig up or cannibalize the parts," Gippal promised. "In the meantime, why not…"

Some time later, when Rikku had long since given up on paying attention and gone back to working on the drill, Gippal finally switched off the CommSphere and said, running a hand through his disheveled hair, "This whole saving-the-world thing is a lot harder than it looked a year ago."

"I can tell. Maybe you do deserve to build a personal hover after all. I wouldn't know, 'cause when I get back I'm gonna sleep for hours and then watch Paine practice flying." Rikku smirked.

"Oh, for the glamorous and carefree life of a sphere hunter!" A few minutes later and apropos of nothing, Gippal said, "Hey, you know what?"

"What?"

"Arru is getting married to a girl in town. A Yevonite girl. Your Yuna won't be one of a kind for much longer.

Rikku grinned. "Yunie'll always be one of a kind."

And then Gippal got up the next morning and went about the long, slow process of saving the world from a thousand years of ignorance, one day at a time.


End file.
